Friday, July 06, 2012

Open machine design as compared to open-source software

Great stuff, with the flood of new 3D printers, people will be able to make their own devices at home. Granted the general consumer will probably never do this, but there will be a growing community of people who will reinvent products as we understand it today. It will allow for a rapid evolution of physical objects that can now evolve at software speeds.

The implications of this for mechanical things like cars and bicycles will be profound , but what will be even more profound will be the evolution of robotic devices. Devices of complexity well beyond what any small company or hobbyist or manager in some corporation would ever dare attempt.
Devices with millions of moving parts will not be a challenge, they will be printed already assembled.

It be open designs free or inexpensive off the Internet where the hardest part will be choosing which one to print.

It will take almost no effort to print one any more then it is today to make a photocopy down at Kinko's or if your own your own printer, simply checking the ink and pressing the print button.

Remember how is was to make a copy of a paper before photocopies and printers with mechanical type writers? How much of an improvement we have now with scanners and printers.

Well the level of improvement for reproduction of mechanical devices is starting to experience that same leap but this is a much larger improvement over current machining technology. This is very much like stepping up from monks with years of study and training making hand coped manuscripts leaping straight to inexpensive personal color photo quality printers.

The speed and ease in which you can reproduce prototypes, design and best yet even evolve them in a virtual world will be astonishing. Creature will literally be able to walk out of a game like spore to walking across your kitchen table in a few hours.